Posts Tagged ‘shopping’

I’m a moron. There, I said it… I got discouraged after a positively horrible shopping experience, so I turned to the internet. The internet, as everyone knows, never lies or misrepresents things, so you have a much better chance of getting to the truth than if you trust television, newspapers, friends, relatives or shopping catalogues – all of which routinely screw with the truth in ways that a politician would be proud of. The internet is a dear old friend, who advises and consoles, who encourages and assists – and, just to make the universe just a little bit more interesting, sometimes makes things appear larger or smaller than they really are.

There’s a problem with images online – nobody thinks to take photographs of items in context, so pictures of a 19″ television and a 48″ television, side by side, can appear to be the same size. This, if you hadn’t guessed, is where my brain puts one and one together to make five. And before I know what is happening, I’m sitting in front of largest television I’ve ever owned, wondering how the fuck I managed to spend so much money, and…

Aw, hell. Just take a look for yourselves. This is the box it came in:

Jeez. It’s massive. It’s also gonna keep me making repayments for another decade or so, but what the fuck… It’s big, and that is all that matters, right? Chicks might tell ya that size doesn’t matter, but I know different. Now all I have to do is make some space for it.

I have to admit this right now, because I don’t think it’s fair keeping the whole truth back – I didn’t realize how big 32″ was. Seriously, I had no idea the size of this thing until it arrived. Which, in a weird kinda way, made opening the box all the more exciting. I had expected something a bit smaller, but the credit card payment had already gone through, and I don’t want to send it back just because I can’t tell the difference between a medium television and a gigantic one.

Selling, right? That is basically what Christmas exists for. It’s the financial equivalent of lions rounding on antelopes in the wild, only the slick and shallow bastards throwing Santa Clause at us don’t want to kill us, they want to fuck us. They want our credit card details, our e-mail addresses, our ‘phone numbers and our continued (and, apparently, ‘valued’) custom. They want to shill us for everything we have, then get us so hooked on their products that we run up credit card debts which would shame third world nations. C’mon, lets face it – Shops are no better than crack dealers at this time of year, and it is all legal.

But… Here’s the thing. They don’t realize that in between the sales and the hype and the never-ending jingle music – which, one of these days, is gonna be the cause of a shooting spree – there is little actual assistance on offer. Since I’ve been looking for a new television, I’ve been subject to an endless parade of seventeen year-old’s, all equally indifferent to the customers and determined the chew their way through ever single word they speak. And not a single one of them seems to know the difference between plasma and LCD, or the different functions available on the products they are meant to be advising on.

It’s almost as if they don’t want to take my money. It did occur to me that my insistence on paying cash was probably hindering the speed at which things are going. Then another though hit me – when did money lose its value? It isn’t as if I’m offering to pay them in Monopoly money, but they look at the spending of cold, hard cash as the actions of a fucking madman. It’s completely insane. The shops were always going to be hard to deal with at this time of year, but the electrical retailers in the UK seem to be going out of their way to make things as difficult as possible. Doesn’t anyone know “the customer is always right” any more?

In order to minimize my aggravation at dealing with idiots, I’ve been looking through the pages of online retailers as well, but they have an even bigger agenda at the moment, and dealing with customers who want smaller end items is beyond their comprehension. If you want to lay down five grand on a television you’ll be in your element, but looking for a set which has a more modest outlay is next to impossible. A lot of electrical companies also has an insistence on horrendous videos playing on their websites, and that slows the process of browsing through their wares even more annoying than the process would otherwise be.

Having said – on numerous occasions – that Christmas isn’t a particularly festive season, and that I don’t think much of cold weather, faux-merriness, terrible music and bullshit promotions (that crap “on sale” was the same price in the summer) I have come to regard this as punishment for my disbelief in the holiday.